Data management at Microsoft

Data retention

In our Microsoft Product Terms, Microsoft contractually commits to specific processes when a customer leaves a cloud service or the subscription expires. This includes deleting customer data from systems under our control. 

• If you terminate a cloud subscription or it expires (except for free trials), Microsoft will store your customer data in a limited-function account for 90 days (the “retention period”) to give you time to extract the data or renew your subscription. During this period, Microsoft provides multiple notices, so you will be amply forewarned of the upcoming deletion of data.
• After this 90-day retention period, Microsoft will disable the account and delete the customer data, including any cached or backup copies. For in-scope services, that deletion will occur within 90 days after the end of the retention period. (In-scope services are defined in the Data Processing Terms section of our Microsoft Product Terms.)
  

When customer data is hosted in the multitenant environments of Microsoft business cloud services, we take careful measures to logically separate customer data. This helps prevent one customer’s data from leaking into that of another customer, which also helps to block any customer from accessing another customer’s deleted data.

Data deletion on physical storage devices

If a disk drive used for storage suffers a hardware failure, it is securely erased or destroyed before Microsoft returns it to the manufacturer for replacement or repair. The data on the drive is completely overwritten to ensure the data cannot be recovered by any means.

When such devices are decommissioned, they are purged or destroyed according to NIST 800-88 Guidelines for Media Sanitation.